Chinese authorities warned Crown Casino last year about touting high roller gamblers - Bloomberg

Chinese authorities warned Crown Resorts Ltd. last year to halt its efforts to attract high rollers from the mainland to gamble overseas, according to a person familiar with the government’s move to detain 18 of the Melbourne-based company’s employees.

China confirmed on Monday that staff members of Crown Resorts were being held in Shanghai for alleged gambling-related crimes, a development that sent the company’s shares plunging. Crown Resorts was among companies that received warnings after China arrested employees last summer at Korea casino operators Paradise Co. and Grand Korea Leisure Co., according to the person, who asked not to be identified because the probe is confidential.

After the warning, Chinese authorities observed that Crown Resorts had senior executives make short business trips to China instead of spending long periods in the country, the person said. They also noted that the company shifted its marketing activities to focus more on resorts instead of casinos, the person said. Authorities don’t perceive those actions as amounting to a material change in Crown’s activities, the person added.

‘Deeply Concerned’

A spokeswoman for Crown Resorts in Melbourne declined to comment on any warning given to the company by Chinese authorities. Faxed questions to China’s ministry of public security, which oversees law enforcement activities, were not immediately answered.

China hasn’t specified any of the charges, and it hasn’t been possible to contact any of those detained. The detention and charges will not automatically lead to a prosecution.

In a rare public statement e-mailed by Crown on Tuesday, largest shareholder and Australian billionaire James Packer said he’s “deeply concerned” for employees held in China. The move wiped $1 billion from the company’s market value on Monday, with the shares falling 14 percent. They were up 1.7 percent in Sydney on Tuesday.

“Our number one priority is to be able to make contact and to ensure they are all safe,” Packer said. He also added he was “respectful” of China’s sovereign rules.

‘Break the Chain’

The action against Crown Resorts is part of a broader effort by Chinese authorities to curtail overseas gambling. The nation’s leaders have linked those activities to corruption, money-laundering and domestic instability, particularly because many Chinese gamblers who have gone broke were small business owners.

Police had been investigating Crown Resorts for several months as part of an operation targeting gambling-related activities dubbed "Duanlian" -- or "to break the chain" -- with the goal of terminating personal and financial links between foreign casino operators and Chinese clients, according to the person familiar with the case. The probe is focusing on whether the company enticed Chinese nationals to gamble in Australia, as well as if it used an illegal settlement network or other underground banking services to transfer money out of the country, the person said.

The operation risks reinforcing fears among international casino operators about doing business in mainland China, where it’s illegal to market gambling to Chinese nationals. It could also unsettle gambling businesses in Macau, the world’s largest casinos hub, which saw revenue decline in recent years as President Xi Jinping clamped down on corruption.

Gambling Raids

Macau has sought to diversify its economy since Xi in 2014 ordered the former Portugese colony to reduce its dependence on gambling. Casinos in countries including the Philippines, South Korea and Australia have sought to fill the gap by working with so-called junket operators who bring Chinese high rollers overseas and lend them money to gamble with -- in effect skirting the mainland’s currency controls.

In an operation this summer in the adjacent Guangdong province, Chinese police arrested nearly 800 people for crimes including "organizing illegal gambling activities overseas." Police also raided an underground bank linked to the crime group that turned up more than 20 billion yuan ($3 billion).

All of the employees from the Korean casino operators arrested in June 2015 have now been released. Six Paradise employees who were arrested have been set free after serving jail time, a company spokeswoman said Monday. Out of Grand Korea’s seven jailed employees, three were released in August and four on Monday, its spokesman said Tuesday.

— With assistance by Brendan Scott

Trump's son-in-law planning Trump TV after election - Financial Times

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YESTERDAY

by: Matthew Garrahan and James Fontanella-Khan in New York

Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has informally approached one of the media industry’s top dealmakers about the prospect of setting up a Trump television network after the presidential election in November.

Mr Kushner — an increasingly influential figure in the billionaire’s presidential campaign — contacted Aryeh Bourkoff, the founder and chief executive of LionTree, a boutique investment bank, within the past couple of months, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

Their conversation was brief and has not progressed since, the people said. Mr Bourkoff and Mr Kushner both declined to comment.

However, the approach suggests Mr Kushner and the Republican candidate himself are thinking about how to capitalise on the populist movement that has sprung up around their campaign in the event of an election defeat to Democrat Hillary Clinton next month. Mr Trump has in recent days ramped up his criticism of the “dishonest and distorted” mainstream media, which he accuses of being biased against him in collusion with the Clinton campaign. 

In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal opinion poll, published this weekend, Mr Trump trailed Mrs Clinton by 11 points nationally.

Mr Trump, whose campaign is headed by populist digital media entrepreneur Stephen Bannon, has denied that he wants to start his own channel. “I have no interest in a media company. False rumour,” he told the Washington Post last month, following a Vanity Fair report that he and his advisers had explored the idea.

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Mr Bourkoff, who launched LionTree in 2012, has advised on transactions worth more than $300bn, including Liberty Global’s $23.3bn acquisition of Virgin Media and Verizon’s $4.4bn takeover of AOL. He is also John Malone’s favoured adviser and helped the so-called “Cable Cowboy” consolidate the US pay-TV industry — in deals that culminated in Charter Communications’ $78bn takeover of Time Warner Cable this year.

More importantly, Mr Bourkoff is a friend of Mr Kushner, who is married to Mr Trump’s daughter Ivanka. The two have worked together in the past: Mr Bourkoff advised Mr Kushner, who also owns the weekly New York Observer newspaper, when he tried to buy the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team four years ago. 

Establishing a Trump television network would be difficult, even with a potentially large audience for its programming. 

Cable and satellite companies are loath to take on extra channels in an era of shrinking audiences and “cord-cutting” — the cancellation of pricey pay-TV subscriptions in favour of cheaper, online alternatives. An “over the top” digital service would be one possibility but still costly because Mr Trump and Mr Kushner would need to spend heavily on marketing, talent and technology.

Roger Ailes, the former head of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News Channel, is a friend of Mr Trump’s but would be prohibited from working on a Trump television venture by the terms of his exit agreement with the news network. He parted company with Fox this summer following an independent investigation into claims he sexually harassed Gretchen Carlson, a former Fox News presenter. 

However, Sean Hannity, Mr Trump’s biggest cheerleader on Fox News, would be free to work for a prospective Trump network. Mr Hannity was among several Fox stars, including Bill O’Reilly, to have a clause in their contracts allowing them to leave if Mr Ailes did — although this clause will expire at some point in the near future. 

Talk about a Trump network has persisted, partly because of the fervent crowds that Mr Trump continues to attract on the campaign trail and his existing links to conservative media. Mr Bannon, the chairman of Breitbart, a network of rightwing news sites, was hired in August to run the Trump campaign. Breitbart is currently on a global expansion push, with the aim of adding sites in Germany and France to its existing operations in the US and Israel.

Trump playing dangerous game in fighting all traditional media - New York Magazine

As this election year gears down toward a frenzied conclusion, one of the constants of modern American politics, Republican demonization of the mainstream news media as “biased,” is reaching a new level of savagery at the hands of Donald Trump.

Commenting on the tone of Trump rallies this week, Politico’s Ben Schreckinger was clearly shaken by the anti-media hate fever:

As the Republican nominee has resorted to more extreme denunciations of the press in recent days, his supporters have followed suit. Chants of “CNN sucks” have become commonplace at Trump’s rallies this week and members of the traveling press were called “whores” and “press-titutes” as they filed out of a Thursday afternoon rally in West Palm Beach. Minutes before, Trump had accused reporters of participating in a vast globalist conspiracy against his campaign and American workers.

No, it’s not just rootless cosmopolitans and international bankers who are in league with Crooked Hillary to destroy the U.S. economy and keep the white man down. It’s also the media folk who made the second presidential debate a “one-on-three” unequal battle, as Trump self-pityingly (or more likely, cynically) argued in accosting the two moderators.

Crowds that once booed and shouted at the press mainly at Trump’s prompting — when he would decry them as “dishonest” and “scum” or demand that television cameras pan his crowds — have now begun spontaneously targeting the press on their own, at a scale not yet seen in this campaign, or any in memory on American soil.

Now Ben Schreckinger is pretty young, and so cannot remember George Wallace’s presidential campaigns, wherein it was standard procedure for the candidate to point out liberal Yankee reporters to his angry supporters at campaign events. But Wallace seemed to be toying with mainstream media figures rather than actively threatening them, and he was never a major-party presidential nominee, either.

It is also hard to think of a precedent for a presidential candidate who has made the game of “beat the press” (to borrow the name of Dean Baker’s blog, which aims a critical but judicious eye at economics reporting) so integral and multifaceted a part of his campaign. The immediate motive for the latest bout of Trumpian media-bashing is to counter the drumbeat of new allegations about the mogul’s crude and possibly illegal sexual behavior and his habit of saying creepy things about women. What the media ought to be covering, say Trump and his surrogates, is the WikiLeaks disclosures of Clinton campaign emails. But the broader trend in the Trump camp’s rhetoric is to go “full Breitbart”: to regard all “Establishment” politicians and media outlets, even those normally thought of as conservatives, as part of a conspiracy to defend the status quo. For readers who have risked singed hair and shocked sensibilities by reading the website recently run by Trump’s campaign chairman Stephen Bannon, Breitbart.com turns the volume of media-hatred right up to 11.

Arguably these developments are mainly of interest to journalists who with good reason fear that their ability to do their jobs — and perhaps even their liberty — could be at risk if Trump somehow wins. But there is growing danger to the integrity of the election itself, and to civic peace on and after November 8.

The same allegedly lying and conspiring media who are tormenting poor Trump are the people who will report on and interpret the elections toward which we are barreling. Trump has already conspicuously warned that the election is “rigged” or will be “stolen” and is stirring up his supporters to police voting sites for signs of chicanery. To be sure, “voter fraud” is mostly imaginary, but it’s an emotionally powerful symbol of white fears that minority folk will be herded by their government-benefit paymasters to the polls to vote themselves more welfare (and/or less immigration enforcement).

Let’s say the Breitbartians gin up some real Election Day hysteria about the “rigged” or “stolen” election, and it merges with rumors or even reports of election-machinery hacking — say, from somewhere in the vicinity of Russia. You have all the ingredients for a disputed election, and perhaps real and widespread violence. After all, if the people telling us what’s happening are part of a conspiracy to change what’s happening, what other recourse does the frightened patriot have?

In the first presidential debate Trump famously promised not only to accept defeat if it comes to pass, but to “support” a President-elect Hillary Clinton if there is one. But he began backing away from that pledge almost immediately, and it is getting hard to imagine him on November 9 telling his supporters to stop demanding Clinton’s incarceration and begin treating her as a legitimate chief executive. Besides, it was one of those lying debate moderators who ambushed Trump with the question about accepting Clinton, and you can’t trust any of them, can you?

How Stronger Unions Could Fix Our Economy — And Our Politics - TIME Business

How Stronger Unions Could Fix Our Economy — And Our Politics

Posted: 11 Oct 2016 04:00 AM PDT

Of the little we’ve heard, much of this election’s economic policy discussion has focused on what can be done about our historically slow growth, rising inequality, and decreasing social mobility. But neither candidate has focused on one no-brainer solution: strengthening unions.
That might seem a contentious statement in a country with decades of fraught relations between corporations and labor. But as a new report from the left-leaning Center for American Progress outlines, a stronger labor movement may be the quickest way to spur the sort of broad-based growth (via wage hikes) that we need to create a more sustainable, robust recovery.

“It’s become pretty clear that in order to raise wages and reduce inequality, the number one thing that we could do would be to increase worker power within our economy,” says David Madland, a senior fellow at CAP and the author of the study.
Strengthening unions might also have the knock-on effect of decreasing populism. At least some of the ugliness we’ve seen this election cycle has been rooted in rising inequality. Meanwhile, about one-third of the recent increase in wage inequality for American males can be attributed to weakening unions, according to research by Harvard and Washington University academics. A separate IMF study found that countries without unions see a 10% increase in the share of income that goes to the highest earners.
By contrast, the social benefits of unions stretch across generations. American children of fathers without a college education earn 28% more if their dad was in a labor union, compared to those whose fathers were non-union. In other words, the demise of American unions — only about 7% of private sector workers currently belong to one — has been a key factor in the rising wealth gap, but also in the sort of horrific, Hobbesian presidential politics we’ve seen over the past year. (Many economists see the wealth gap as a big reason why we aren’t enjoying a more sustainable recovery.)
The big challenge to revitalizing unions is moving beyond today’s system of labor law, which hasn’t been updated since 1935. Unions get a bad rap in the U.S. in part because most collective bargaining can be done only at a firm-by-firm level. That creates a race to the bottom away from higher-wage unionized firms. Yet there is a wealth of research that shows that when bargaining can be done at an industry level — the way it is in most other countries, including Germany, Sweden, Australia, and Canada, among others — you get higher national wages without sacrificing economic competitiveness. That’s because factors like labor representation on corporate boards and the ability to bargain collectively is associated with greater productivity levels, as management and labor are better able to work together to solve problems. (See here for an example of how this helped German companies gain market share against U.S. firms in the wake of the financial crisis.)
Such a drastic change won’t be easy. Reforming the National Labor Relations Board will require policy action. “Legal changes [to collective bargaining structures] have to come first – unions simply aren’t powerful enough right now to drive this change on their own,” says Madland. Yet there are already examples at the state and local level that show the potential of a new kind of labor movement. Think about the Fight for $15 movement in various cities, which has helped bolster low-end service pay across industries. It’s something that Hillary (fingers crossed) should make a top priority if she’s elected. It would help stabilize our economy — and our democracy, too.

Samsung sacrificed Galaxy 7 for company survival - TIME

Samsung Sacrificed the Note 7 to Save the Company

Posted: 14 Oct 2016 07:58 AM PDT

Samsung has killed the Galaxy Note 7. It is writing off $2.3 billion in the third quarter due to the cancellation of the highly touted phone. From my perspective, it was a smart, wise and cost-effective decision. Samsung sacrificed the Note 7 to save the company. The decision was not about the Note 7 itself, but about the brand and the company’s relationship with its customers. It is bigger than one product.

A company’s brand is the promise it makes to the customer. The depth and resilience of the brand is how it keeps that promise. We know that every brand makes mistakes. It’s how a company chooses to deal with those mistakes that can maintain — or demolish — its credibility.

Samsung is a huge, multinational company with products, programs, and services across many market segments. It rolled out the Galaxy Note 7 with much hype and fanfare, only to quickly find out it had a problem. Some of the phones caught fire or exploded. That was not the sizzling type of launch it was seeking. Early on it thought it was a simple issue of a battery vendors which delivered an inferior product. Simple fix, right? Not so, because the replacement phones with the new battery had the same problem. It was then made clear that Samsung didn’t know the root of the problem.

With consumers, airlines and regulators all engaged, Samsung had a choice: Continue to try to find out what’s wrong, perhaps by troubleshooting and risk issuing recall after recall? Or, does it step up and decide that the cost of trying to save the Note 7 is not worth risking the entire Samsung brand? It took the second road.

Clearly, Samsung had a lot of investment in this product. The timing couldn’t have been better for its rival, Google, (not Apple in my opinion) which was fresh off the launch of its new Pixel phones. Since the Pixel phones and Samsung’s Note 7 run the same operating system, some believe that the Pixel is the biggest beneficiary of the Note 7’s demise. This was not an easy decision for Samsung, but I think it made it fairly quickly, based on how these things go.

Looking down the road, Samsung hopes consumers will have gotten over the Note 7 debacle, and it will be a footnote in the overall history of the company. A single, short-lived, bad product that was pulled quickly and everyone moved on. Samsung needed to sacrifice the Note 7 to save the overall brand. That’s what it has done. It will cost them hundreds of millions of dollars, if not a few billion dollars, but it’s the right thing to do.

Moving forward, Samsung will undoubtedly focus on quality control throughout its supply chain and at every step of the product development cycle. These steps will make up key message points in its branding and public statements in the future. It will stay away from the safety issue and focus on the process improvement and quality control issue.

There’s no question Samsung will lose some smartphone customers. Will it lose customers of its other products, like televisions or computers? Perhaps in the short term, but this move is all about the long term.

Samsung’s timing of the recall announcement — in the middle of the second U.S. Presidential debate — could be seen as either a way to “bury” the headline or as a way to ensure that a larger audience would see the news (though it’s a South Korean company, so the time difference may have played a role). Either way, the story made headlines. You can’t hide news anymore in our 24/7 news cycle culture.

Often, the public doesn’t realize the complexity of crisis management. It is difficult, and requires having a good team in place. The companies that do it best prepare for it. They know it’s going to happen.

The Samsung situation reminds me of the Firestone tire recall of the early 2000s. At first, Firestone was trying to figure out what was wrong. It quickly pulled all tires off the market, and gave everyone new tires. It cost the brand greatly, but it’s still here nearly 20 years later.

When we look at Samsung, there might be some people who are upset with the decision to pull the phone. But, if you can’t fix it and be confident, you need to take it out of the marketplace and move forward. Samsung is going to continue to innovate. It wants to make sure that people aren’t afraid of Samsung phones or any other Samsung product and see this for what it is: A one-product failure in a large and diverse company.

Facebook Wants to Kill Work Email With This New App - Fortune

Facebook Wants to Kill Work Email With This New App Posted: 10 Oct 2016 11:50 AM PDT You can officially add Facebook to the list of software companies seeking to all-but-eliminate corporate email. The social network’s much-anticipated business edition—formally dubbed Workplace by Facebook, rather than the Facebook at Work moniker used during its 18-month beta test—has already been adopted by more than 1,000 companies, according to information that Facebook plans to share Monday evening during the product’s official launch event in London. That includes some accounts Facebook has trumpeted pretty loudly over the past year, like the Royal Bank of Scotland and Club Med, plus several multinational businesses we haven’t heard about before that are rolling out the service among more than 100,000 employees such as French food giant Danone, and U.S. coffee company Starbucks. One of the regions embracing the service most quickly is India. For perspective, that adoption rate is more than double the 450 organizations that were part of Facebook’s not-so-secret beta program just six months ago. But now, the consumer Internet company needs to convince businesses to become paying customers at a cost of $1 to $3 per user—a price that varies depending on the number of workers who are actually “active” on the service within an organization. Facebook will give companies a three-month free trial of the service to convince managers that investment is worthwhile, says Julien Codorniou, director of Workplace by Facebook. What’s more, Facebook has tapped at least a dozen systems integrators and technology consulting companies, including Deloitte, to spread the word about Workplace and help companies get the software up and running. “The one thing that I really think Facebook has going for them is that the feature set is proven to work on mobile devices really well and proven to work for people without training,” says Josh Bersin, principal and founder of Bersin by Deloitte, which advises companies on corporate learning strategies. He adds, “The biggest problem is just connecting people. The paradigm of email is not good at that.” Workplace by Facebook looks very much like the company’s flagship social network, and that’s by design—the company wants it to be super simple for people to use. Just in case it isn’t clear: the business service is not connected in any way to an employee’s personal Facebook identity. “You get an account when you join the company, you lose the account when you leave the company,” Codorniou tells Fortune. There is a News Feed that displays articles, updates or comments relevant to certain teams or, perhaps, to the entire company. The now-familiar Live service can be used to broadcast corporate communications, such as a presentation by the CEO. Workers can communicate in real time using a version of Messenger. They can also create private Groups for brainstorms or discussions—as of this week, groups can include colleagues or business partners that aren’t official employees. That feature wasn’t previously available until today’s launch. “No company is an island, everyone has a partner, vendor, agencies to work with,” Codorniou says. Workplace by Facebook started life as the internal system used by Facebook employees to share information relevant to their projects more efficiently. “Part of the future of work is that people have the expectation that there will be open communication across the organization, and this is a great way to deliver on that,” explains Lori Goler, Facebook’s vice president of global human resources. As of June 2016, Facebook had about 14,500 employees, all of whom use Workplace as the primary method communicating with teams and sharing knowledge. When asked about the other “tools” Facebook uses internally, Goler points to Quip—the document creation and collaboration service created by Facebook’s former chief scientist Bret Taylor and recently acquired by Salesforce.com. (Facebook still relies on email for external communications, such as the exchange of messages that brokered the interviews for this story.) One of Workplace by Facebook’s core differentiators is the fact that it works well on smartphones and other mobile devices. At Danone, for example, the service will reach 30,000 factory workers who don’t have desks or personal computers. In theory, it could enable a two-way conversation between an intern and the CEO—connections that have nothing to do with an org chart, says Nicola Mendelsohn, vice president for Facebook in Europe. “It is a voice for everybody in an organization, which is especially important if you want to make decisions quickly.” So far, Workplace for Facebook’s support for widely distributed teams is proving particularly compelling for big banks and retailers supporting dozens if not hundreds of satellite branches and offices, Codorniou said. The Yoma Bank in Myanmar, for example, will use Workplace by Facebook to replace fax machines and newsletters. The email “problem” is well-documented, and a survey conducted by Deloitte in September underscores just how disillusioned businesses have become: only 15% of the roughly 250 C-suite executives who responded said they were satisfied with their company’s current collaboration and communication options. There are dozens of software companies seeking to capitalize on that. Three that sell full-blown systems like Workpace by Facebook that use employee directories to create enterprise “social networks” are IBM, Jive Software, and Lithium Technologies. A second class of services from the likes of Microsoft, Salesforce.com, and SAP add messaging and conferencing features to existing business management applications. Facebook will also contend with well-funded startups such as Slack, which had more than three million active users on its business messaging system as of mid-July. In late September, Slack announced a partnership with Salesforce intended to boost its credibility with more big companies. This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

China’s Rich List Reveals the Rise of a New Wave of Wealthy Chinese - TIME

China’s Rich List Reveals the Rise of a New Wave of Wealthy Chinese Posted: 12 Oct 2016 08:06 PM PDT (SHANGHAI) – Chinese property magnate Wang Jianlin has defended his crown as the country’s richest man, according to the annual Hurun rich list, fending off Alibaba Group Holding Ltd founder Jack Ma and new players on the block like Baoneng’s Yao Zhenhua. Wang, the chairman of Dalian Wanda Group, took the top spot with a personal fortune of $32.1 billion, the report said, despite Ma, the founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, seeing his wealth surge 41% from 2015. The annual rich list of China’s movers and shakers gives a temperature check on where money is flowing in China, and underlines the growing financial muscle of the country’s super-rich – a trend that has been fuelling a boom in global deals. Yao Zhenhua, the chairman of Baoneng Group and the biggest riser since 2015, saw his wealth shoot up 820% to $17.2 billion, elevating him to fourth in the overall list. Yao has been at the center of a hostile takeover battle for China’s largest real estate developer China Vanke Co Ltd. Hurun founder Rupert Hoogewerf said Yao represented a new wave of wealthy Chinese, those whose money came from playing the financial markets as opposed to more traditional routes like trade or manufacturing. “There’s a new type of wealth creation coming out,” he told Reuters, adding China was having to adapt as the wider economy was “very materially slowing down”. “Today it is about using the capital markets for financial investment,” he said. Baoneng, a financial conglomerate that had been a relative unknown, rose to prominence over the last year by becoming the largest shareholder in Vanke, though drew criticism from Vanke’s own chairman over where it was getting its funds. The report said there were now 594 dollar billionaires in China, putting China ahead of the United States’ 535. However, none of China’s super-rich make it into the global top 20. Other risers included online gaming tycoon Ding Lei of Netease, appliance maker Midea Group’s He Xiangjian and property magnate Xu Jiayin of Evergrande. However, smartphone maker Xiaomi saw founder Lei Jun fall out of the top 10 as competition in China’s smartphone market rose. Reporting by Jackie Cai and Adam Jourdan; Editing by Stephen Coates

New Metric: You Reach Adulthood When the Bills Are in Your Name - TIME Business

New Metric: You Reach Adulthood When the Bills Are in Your Name Posted: 13 Oct 2016 01:40 PM PDT You can vote at age 18. You can walk into a bar at age 21. But you aren’t an adult until you move out of the basement and start paying your own mobile phone bill, new research suggests. Parents may have been thinking this way for eons. But now young people are on board too. In a poll of 18-to-26-year-olds, 39% said finally achieving financial independence is what would make them an adult. That was the top answer, ahead of 7% naming graduating from high school or college and 7% naming getting married, according to the Bank of America Better Money Habits poll. A stunning 62% do not feel like adults when they turn 18. Read next: Millennials Say Financial Independence Is Their Top Priority This is what the new life phase called “emerging adulthood” looks like. Young people routinely do not launch until they are 28 to 30 years old. They boomerang home after college, pay down their student loans, and wait for the job they want. They delay things like marriage and a home purchase—and, according to the survey, understand full well that they are not carrying the full weight of adulthood. Fewer than half pay rent or have their own health insurance; only a quarter contribute to a 401(k) plan and just over half pay their own cell phone bill, the survey found. These young millennials are acutely aware that they are unprepared for the financial world. Asked what they wish they had learned more about in school, personal finance was the top answer. Here’s a breakdown: 43% wished they had learned how to invest;  40%, how to do taxes;  26%, how to manage monthly bills;  21%, how to save for retirement In many cases, they intend to send a message in the election: 65% say economic issues are most important in determining who they will vote for, ahead of 34% putting cultural issues at the top. The economic issues that are top of mind include job growth, healthcare costs, and college affordability. These findings are echoed in a report from Fidelity, due out this week. That report is expected to show an increase in the number of millennials living with parents. But there is an upside to that trend: More young people appear to have long-term savings and a near-term emergency fund. Living in the basement has its advantages.

Meet the Woman Who Designed Google’s Self-Driving Car - Fortune

Meet the Woman Who Designed Google’s Self-Driving Car Posted: 12 Oct 2016 07:12 AM PDT YooJung Ahn is not a car designer. Until she joined the Google self-driving car project in 2012, Ahn was designing consumer devices that were more likely to fit into a person’s hands, not products a person could actually sit inside—let alone ride around in. It would be this lack of traditional automotive experience that Ahn says gave her—and the small team she has led since 2013—the freedom necessary to develop a Google moonshot that is now within reach: a self-driving car with no steering wheel or pedals that could shuttle a person from point A to B with a touch of a button. In those early brainstorming sessions, the team batted around some wild ideas, like designing a “literal couch with wheels.” But what has made the gumdrop-shaped prototype so revolutionary is its un-wildness. Looking at the simplistic, uncomplicated prototypes, it’s easy to forget that they’re loaded with sensors and artificial intelligence software that has allowed them to navigate thousands of miles of complex urban environments without human intervention. And that’s just how Ahn likes it. It was that integration of technology and innovation that helped the Google self-driving car prototype beat out 4,698 design submissions to win the Red Dot Design award, an international product design prize. Today, Ahn is deep into another automotive project at X, the research lab at Google that pursues moonshot ideas like driverless cars, its Internet balloon called Project Loon, and energy kites. This time, she’s the leading industrial design for self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans. In an interview, edited and condensed for clarity, Fortune asked Ahn about the process of designing Google’s self-driving car prototype. Were there any rules you had to adhere to for the design, aside from not having a steering wheel or pedals? Not having a steering wheel or pedals was actually our choice. It was not even a rule. When we actually started the prototype we didn’t start with a traditional car in our mind. I’m actually a product designer, not a car designer. So when we started designing the prototype, the first thing we considered was this broader concept of mobility. What is the very minimum we needed in order to get people from A to B? What is the most optimized design for safety and user experience? That was the starting point. We needed to create something relatable and very intuitive. It’s a very straightforward experience and not confusing. People have never experienced anything like this before, so we didn’t want to create any confusion. The interesting thing about the self-driving car is you’re designing for passengers and pedestrians, not necessarily for drivers. There’s no driver in the car. Of course, we considered other drivers on the road, but this car was not optimized for driving. Since you’re a product designer, was there a product or symbol that you used as inspiration? A physical representation of what you wanted the prototype to become? The first goal we had was for safety. When we started configuring this vehicle we started with “What is the best way to build a vehicle that is the safest?” “How can we make this car see better so it can be safer than the human driver?” Safety was the No. 1 goal. However, for the inspiration you mentioned I tried not to think about styling much. We tried to think about: What is the best outcome when we try to build a new product that can generate maximized visibility, experience and safety? The answer was: Let’s make it as simple as possible and as intuitive as possible so we can minimize the learning curve for using the vehicle. And one thing to remember is the prototype was designed for testing, not for mass production. Since this is the first time we introduced a concept, it couldn’t be too complicated. That’s why we focused on the soft values like increasing awareness, improving the understanding of technology, and inspiring people. What did you do to make the design approachable, simple, or easy for pedestrians to understand? The No. 1 priority to our team is lets make the roads safer and the design of vehicle needs to reflect that. We optimized the shape for our software and sensors so they can perform as well as possible, that’s No. 1. This car can see 360 degrees and up to two football fields in every direction. It’s the reason why the vehicle is a little bit taller, compact, and soft. We wanted to make sure we built in layers of safety. For example, the front bumper of the vehicle is made out of soft foam and the windshield is flexible so we can keep pedestrians safe. The tertiary aspect of safety is important too. Our goal is to help people feel comfortable with the technology and around the vehicle as well. When we designed our car we wanted to make even the outside of the vehicle comfortable for people. It’s especially important while we’re still in this testing phase, where most people experience our vehicle from the outside rather than the inside. For awhile, we will have a lot more tertiary users than primary users. When I look at the front of the car, it’s like a cute face. Was that intentional? When we started to imagine our very first self-driving car, lots of people imagined something super futuristic, something from the sci-fi movies and stuff. However, when we actually tried to design this first car we realized it’s better to make it warm and welcoming rather than super futuristic and rather cold. This is a low-speed vehicle and we didn’t want to make it look super fast either; it’s not honest. The car design looks slow and people can expect that from the vehicle. “Expected” is one of the emotions we thought up. People can expect how this vehicle is to interact with, otherwise it’s going to be very confusing. You don’t want to design a vehicle that goes only 25 miles per hour but it looks like it can drive 200 mph or something. That would cause some confusion. Was there anything you wanted to include but didn’t because it didn’t fit into the final design vision? There are many. One example, was when we first had some brainstorming sessions we asked people “what do you want to do in the car?” A lot of people at the time—this was years ago—said “oh I want to watch a movie on the car display.” However, we noticed that when people got in there they looked at their phones and tablets and they didn’t want to really use the car display for the movie. Others said they wanted to do games. And then they’d get in the car and actually want to relax and not do something with existing equipment in the car. We actually got more confident. Simpler is not a bad thing; we can actually go simpler. Why did you make the prototype white? Why not go with a color like red so it’s more noticeable? For the very first prototype we knew we’d have a lot more tertiary users than primary users; a lot of people would be looking at it, not necessarily using it. So we thought about the emotions they’ll have when they look. We wanted to give them a safe and warm feeling. It’s white and gray. We didn’t want some polarizing color like red, or green, or orange. In psychology, when you use those colors people can have some anxiety as well. We wanted to have it as safe as possible for people to accept the first generation vehicle. You mentioned you’re a product designer, so you never designed a car before? Well, I probably had some classes on it when I was in school, but I never designed manufacturing (production) cars before. Were you intimidated by that? In my mind, it was more of a benefit for me because I could think of more interesting ideas and think outside of the box because I don’t know much about it. A lot of experienced designers have their routine and their style is built over time. It can be really hard for designers to think something completely different if they know too much about one area. I am pretty sure there are a lot of good car designers who think our car looks a little bit different, and maybe not in a good way. The car did receive a Red Dot design award recently. We were surprised, we didn’t really expect it. But it meant so much to me and my team because (it showed that) people understood how the design furthered the mission of self-driving cars. We were able to do something that’s never been done before. We didn’t need to focus on a design that would sell more products; it was much more than the styling. We learned a lot from the process and we could create something from nothing. It’s a rare chance for designers. A lot of time designers have to design something based on what they’re getting, not from scratch. This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

Samsung lost billions of dollars over Galaxy 7 - TIME Business

Samsung’s Smartphone Recall Is Costing It Billions of Dollars

Posted: 12 Oct 2016 06:44 AM PDT

(SEOUL) – Samsung Electronics Co slashed its quarterly profit estimate by a third on Wednesday, soaking up a $2.3 billion hit from ditching its flagship smartphone in what could be one of the costliest product safety failures in tech history.
Quantifying the financial pain of Tuesday’s move to scrap the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone after a global recall and weeks of mounting problems, the world’s top smartphone maker said it expects its July-September operating profit was 5.2 trillion won ($4.7 billion), down from the 7.8 trillion won it estimated five days ago.
Samsung said in a statement the 2.6 trillion won ($2.3 billion) guidance cut reflects the sales and earning impact it currently expects from the decision to permanently halt sales of the $882 Note 7 device. Its third-quarter revenue estimate was also cut to 47 trillion won from 49 trillion won previously.

The new earnings guidance is 30 percent below third-quarter 2015’s operating profit, and left investors and analysts pondering the longer impact on Samsung’s brand and earnings. Rival suppliers of smartphones that use the Android operating system, like Samsung’s, stand to benefit if the Note 7 damage drive consumers elsewhere.
“It’s possible there could be additional profit impact in the fourth quarter but it likely won’t be as large as the third quarter,” said Park Jung-hoon, a fund manager at HDC Asset Management, which owns shares in Samsung. “I think it’s possible for fourth-quarter profits to come in as much as the high 7 trillion won range.”
Samsung shares ended down 0.7 percent on Wednesday, with the Seoul market closing before the earnings guidance cut was announced.
HDC’s Park said the initial guidance issued last week likely already factored in a 1 trillion won profit impact, putting the total third-quarter earnings hit at around 3.6 trillion won. While this was a major blow, he said some investors had feared the profit impact could be as large as 5 trillion won this year.
Billion-dollar buyback?
Samsung shares have already fallen 10 percent this week and are on track for their biggest weekly decline since May 2012, having touched a one-month low of 1.494 million won as investors worried the Note 7 crisis could inflict long-term damage on Samsung’s reputation and earnings.
Some investors said Samsung may need to return more cash to shareholders, either through a dividend or additional buybacks, to calm market jitters. HDC’s Park said the cash-rich firm may need to announce a buyback of between 2 trillion won and 3 trillion won in order to mollify shareholders whose nerves have been jangled.
The tech giant announced the recall of 2.5 million Note 7s in early September following reports of the phones catching fire. The firm appeared to have the situation under control as it issued replacement devices with different batteries, until new phones also began to smoke and combust.
Investors and analysts agreed that the damage to Samsung’s brand and future earnings would deepen the longer the market was left in the dark about the origin of the fault. Some have already predicted lost revenue in the region of $17 billion for Samsung.
“There needs to be explanation from Samsung in order for consumers to understand that problems won’t occur in the next models…Samsung needs to clearly explain and admit what went wrong,” said IBK Asset Management fund manager Kim Hyun-su. The asset manager owns shares in Samsung.
Samsung would likely push ahead to get the latest version of its premium S-series smartphones to market as soon as possible, fund managers said. Typically, the South Korean company unveils a new Galaxy S phone on the sidelines of the Mobile World Congress tech trade show in the first quarter as it battles AppleInc to stay at the top of the smartphone market.
‘Damage control’
Experts are baffled by what could be causing the overheating in the replacement phones, if not the batteries, and Samsung has not commented.
An official at the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards, which is investigating the problem alongside Samsung, said the fault in the replacement devices might not be the same as the problem in the original product. The official asked not to be identified as he was not authorised to speak publicly.
Aviation authorities and airlines around the world are telling passengers to switch off their Note 7s and keep them out of checked baggage, amid fears they could bring down a plane.
“Damage control at Samsung will face an uphill battle to redeem the company’s tarnished image owing to the dangerous and dramatic nature of the phone’s failure,” Vijay Michalik, an analyst at research firm Frost & Sullivan, said.
While the damage to Samsung’s brand, if not its earnings, remains hard to quantify, negative publicity from the botched recall could touch off a turf war among Android smartphone manufacturers, analysts said.
Consumers tend to commit to their choice between Apple’s iOS operating system and Google’s Android, leaving Samsung’s fellow Android manufacturers such as LG Electronics Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google in prime position to strike.
($1 = 1,114.7500 won)
(Reporting by Se Young Lee; Additional reporting by Joyce Lee and Nataly Pak; Writing by Lincoln Feast; Editing by Stephen Coates and Kenneth Maxwell)

Philippines's President Duterte is planning to break with USA -

Rodrigo Duterte has vowed to expel American troops from the Philippines, accused the C.I.A. of plotting to kill him and insulted President Obama with an obscenity.

But beyond the blasts of hyperbole — he recently compared himself to Hitler — lies a real and potentially historic shift in Philippines foreign policy.

In public statements and interviews during the past week, Mr. Duterte’s top foreign policy advisers said he was seeking to break the Philippines out of the United States’ orbit and signal to China that he is ready to negotiate closer ties after years of wrangling over its military presence in the South China Sea.

The move is a radical departure for a country that has historically been the most dependable American ally in Southeast Asia, and could undermine Mr. Obama’s so-called pivot to Asia, a keystone of his foreign policy. That strategy depends on American allies to counter China’s increasing power in the region.

move has already tilted the balance of power, said Richard Javad Heydarian, a political scientist at De La Salle University in Manila. By declining to press claims against China over disputed territory there, despite a favorable ruling by a United Nations tribunal, Mr. Duterte has made it hard for the United States to galvanize international pressure on China over the issue.

“Almost single-handedly Duterte has reshaped the regional strategic dynamics, with both Beijing and Washington recalibrating their next move in the South China Sea as they try to anticipate the Filipino strongman’s foreign policy trajectory,” Mr. Heydarian said.

Mr. Duterte, who is expected to visit Beijing this month, has made no secret of his worldview.

“I will be reconfiguring my foreign policy,” he said in a speech last week. And at some point, “I will break up with America.”

Often after Mr. Duterte makes an over-the-top pronouncement, an aide emerges to walk it back. But in this case, the retreat was slight.

Mr. Duterte was not seeking a breakup with the United States, the president’s spokesman, Ernesto Abella, explained, so much as “an open relationship.”

On Tuesday, Foreign Secretary Perfecto Yasay Jr. went further, explaining in a statement posted online that the Philippines needed to chart a new, independent foreign policy because “America has failed us.”

independence from the United States, its former colonial master, in 1946, Mr. Yasay wrote, “the United States held on to invisible chains that reined us in towards dependency and submission as little brown brothers not capable of true independence and freedom.”

American officials have sought to deflect and diminish the significance of these statements, and emphasize the benefits to the Philippines of the American presence.

“Our history of cooperation spans 70 years, and our commitment to this country remains unchanged,” the United States ambassador, Philip S. Goldberg, said Wednesday in a speech to the American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines here. “The Philippines is a key strategic partner of the United States, and our military alliance, development assistance and commercial cooperation continue.”

Although Mr. Duterte declared last month that the annual joint military exercises now underway on the island of Luzon would be the last during his administration, American officials said his government had made no formal requests to halt any programs. Nor has it followed up on Mr. Duterte’s threat to eject American forces from the southern Philippines, where a rotating force of 50 to 100 troops helps combat Abu Sayyaf, an Islamic-themed kidnap-for-ransom gang.

“As it has been for decades, our alliance with the Philippines is ironclad,” the American defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, said late last month.

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The United States is giving the Philippines over $90 million in military aid this year and has provided more than $1 billion in nonmilitary support over the last five years, much of it for disaster relief, American officials said.

On Friday, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said that “we can live without” the military aid.

Some of the tension between the allies has come from international outrage over Mr. Duterte’s bloody campaign against drugs, which has led to the killing of about 1,400 suspects by the police and hundreds of other extrajudicial killings. It was his concern that Western powers would lecture him over the policy that prompted Mr. Duterte’s denunciation of Mr. Obama, as well as similar tirades against the United Nations and the European Union.

Mr. Duterte, 71, identifies himself as a socialist and views the West through the lens of the Cold War and the Philippines as the victim of historic American imperialism.

But the recalibration also provides an opportunity to improve ties with China, the region’s biggest military power and largest economy. China was the Philippines’ second-largest trading partner last year, with total trade of $17.6 billion. (The United States was third and Japan first.)

China has been making inroads in the region with promises of investment and with its military expansion in the South China Sea, where it has occupied islands claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam and other countries, in some cases building forts.

That dispute led to deteriorating relations under the previous Philippines administration, which filed a claim against China with the United Nations maritime tribunal over the Scarborough Shoal, a reef claimed by both nations and occupied by China.

The tribunal ruled in the Philippines’ favor in July. There is no enforcement mechanism for the ruling, and it has been dismissed by China.

But the victory has given Mr. Duterte a stronger hand in negotiations, where he is expected to use the ruling as leverage in reaching his own deal with China in a way that will allow its leaders to save face.

In August, he sent former President Fidel Ramos, 88, to Hong Kong to meet with officials in what Mr. Ramos described as an effort to build trust and find common interests.

Advisers to the president say one potential deal would be to let China maintain control of Scarborough Shoal if it made concessions such as restoring access to Filipino fishermen and investing in infrastructure development in the Philippines.

“He doesn’t want to provoke China any further,” Jesus G. Dureza, a longtime friend of Mr. Duterte’s who holds the cabinet post of peace adviser, said in an interview. “He feels aligning with our allies against China is not going to benefit the country.”

Mr. Dureza said he and other cabinet members favored opening direct talks with China in part because of fear that, despite a 65-year-old mutual defense treaty, the United States would not be willing to defend the Philippines.

“The idea is that our allies are not going to go to war for us, so why should we align with them?” he said.

Relations with Beijing have already grown warmer, he said, with Chinese officials saying that now “we can talk like Asians across the table with Asians.”

At the same time, despite the sometimes harsh words, Philippine officials have made it clear that the new president does not want to abandon the United States.

“While we would like to foster a closer relationship with China, we will certainly not engage in any alliance with China in a military viewpoint because that has never been the intention of the president,” Mr. Yasay, the foreign secretary, said at a Senate hearing on Thursday. “The president, on many occasions, has said categorically that he will only have one military alliance, and our only ally in that respect is the United States.”

That statement may suggest a future in which the Philippines plays the big powers against each other.